How to Create a Seamless Customer Experience on B2B Websites
Over the last couple of years, a significant increase of attention has been paid to customer experience, but primarily focuses on B2C markets.
Unfortunately, B2B customer experience performance is still lagging and can struggle for attention amidst other corporate priorities.
Why does seamless customer experience matter?
A seamless customer experience plays a massive role in your company. A seamless journey for your customers will show them they’re an essential priority for your business.
If people feel positive about their experience with your company, they’ll be conducting more business with you in the future. Check out ways to create an e-commerce marketing plan that creates brand value.
10 Smart Ways to Create a Seamless Customer Experience
Now that we’ve walked you with the basics, here are the actionable ways on how you can develop a seamless customer experience on B2B websites:
1. Know your customers
Before creating a high-quality customer experience, you need to know who you’re working with. However, in the B2B industry, it’s highly likely that people aren’t that excited to do business with you.
In fact, according to a study, 59% of B2B buyers would prefer to do their research online rather than talk to a sales rep since most sales reps push their agendas instead of solving the customers’ problems.
Most B2B buyers also go through a lot of pressure since they’re responsible for spending their company’s money and picking a product that will boost their company’s efficiency and revenue. They’re anxious when they do their research and make purchases. That anxiety will even linger after they’ve made the purchase.
Keeping this in mind, you need to create a customer experience to ease those fears and make their job easier. In other words, knowing the unique needs of a B2B buyer is crucial. So take advantage of the data available to understand what industry your customers are in.
You should also be aware of their geographic focus, where they currently are in the customer journey, and what their future goals are. Without a solid foundation of this understanding, you can’t provide a seamless customer experience.
2. Make your website responsive
Have you ever come across a shrunken version of a site on your mobile? Then, you probably know how frustrating this can be, especially if it involves a lot of pinching and zooming.
In 2015, Google made a responsive design for its key ranking signals. It is one of the best things you need to do if you want to optimize the user experience. To test your site’s responsiveness, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. It will show you whether a specific URL is responsive or not.
A highly responsive site will adjust on the device that accesses the site. With over 60% of online searches coming from mobile devices, a responsive site is crucial.
3. Provide a simplified cart experience
You can sell your products at different price ranges depending on the type of customer or group. As you segment customers to personalize the shopping experience, you have to offer ‘special’ pricing to more demanding customers.
Since most B2B shoppers purchase in bulk, you might want to offer additional discount tiers based on the total quantity they’ve ordered.
4. Make your website easy to navigate
You also want your site to be easy to navigate to make it possible for buyers to find the information they need as quickly and efficiently as possible and make a purchase. Making their way through your site should be effortless.
If not, they’ll quickly move to another store to look for a better customer experience.
Here are the best B2B tips that you can apply when it comes to navigation:
- Be clear with the intentions of your buyer. That way, you can develop effective navigation that fits your customers’ needs.
- Offer product categories, product filters, and hierarchies that are easily recognizable.
- Having a mega menu that accommodates plenty of grouped options per category. This is a fit for B2B stores with a wide range of product offerings.
5. Offer user-friendly site search
At Sytian Productions (web design philippines), we always tell clients that having an optimized site search is a key to having a more streamlined customer experience. It is valid for B2B sites with various product catalogs with large SKUs and where intent-driven buyers can look for specific items.
Moreover, leveraging your site search boosts your conversion rates and page views. Investing in an intelligent site search solution will show that you understand your buyer’s desire for ease and simplicity.
6. Offer personalized experiences
You’ll get better results if you develop a site where you can customize the experience for every visitor. The good news is that it isn’t as challenging as it seems.
In fact, according to a study, 94% of marketers see personalization as the best solution to achieve success online. Through personalization, you can establish a strong connection and boost your conversions.
Here are some ways that you can do this:
- Segment your audience. Have a clear understanding of your target demographic. Use different tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insight, and Kissmetrics to your advantage. You can use these to gather data about your audience to develop a more personalized experience for them.
- Improve website personalization. You can recommend products based on a customer’s search behavior, offer more personalized content based on the referral source, and switch up content based on the time of their visit. You can even personalize it based on the device that they’re using.
- Personalized CTAs. Research shows a 78.5% increase in conversions in CTAs if they’re personalized.
As data privacy regulations tighten, marketers are facing rising expectations for personalization. Consider adding translation services to your website to cater to visitors from other countries. Customizing headlines and banners is another way to personalize website content based on demographic information in order to display the information most relevant to audience segments from specific regions. Finally, featured posts on your website can be personalized to appeal to certain consumer markets relatively easily. All of these strategies can be used to allow your website to target unique customers according to your product or service offering.
7. Provide an efficient and fast customer service
Time is a precious resource and commodity, not only for you but also for your customers.
If a process takes too long, or if there are time restrictions, you’ll lose out on customers in the long run. The goal here is to offer them fast and efficient customer service, both on and off-site.
8. Provide a consistent experience
In the same way, you should also provide a robust omnichannel experience.
Since the B2B buying process is complex, and there are different buyer personas involved in every stage of the process, it’s relatively common that multiple channels to be used in a single purchase.
9. Adopt customer self-service
You can also boost responsive times by turning to customer self-service.
Offer resources like chatbots, community forums, and knowledge bases. It allows customers to look for solutions to problems. In the same way, it decreases incoming case volumes, making it easy for you to respond to inquiries.
10. Offer post-purchase support
The customer experience doesn’t end after purchasing in the B2B world. Your customers want companies that they can turn to rather than look for another supplier each time they’re looking for something new.
One of the keys to establishing long-term relationships with them is offering post-purchase support.
Over to You
So there you have it. Those are some of the ways that you can provide a seamless B2B customer experience.
The more you can deliver a seamless customer experience, the higher the chances you’ll be well ahead in the game and stand out from the rest of the pack. Good luck!